Discussion Guide Chapter 11
Mader, 10th edition
1. Why does the idea of blending inheritance failed to explain the obvious?
2. Explain why Mendel’s particulate theory was successful and how the garden
pea helped him.
3. What were Mendel's conclusions that led to his Law of Segregation?
4. What is the significance of using upper- and lowercase versions of the same
letter (for example, A and a) for the dominant and recessive trait, respectively,
rather than a capital A for dominant and the letter B (or b) for recessive?
5. An individual who has two of the same alleles is said to be _______________. If
the individual has two different alleles they are said to be ______________.
6. The appearance resulting from a given gene combination is referred to as
_____________.
7. How Mendel’s second law be explained with your knowledge of meiosis?
8. What is the significance of Mendel’s use of mathematical and statistical analysis
in his research?
9. How is a test cross performed? How is it interpreted?
10. Why can autosomal dominant traits appear in every generation?
11. How might you distinguish an autosomal dominant trait from an autosomal
recessive trait when viewing a pedigree?
12. For autosomal recessive disorders, what are the chances of two carriers having an
affected child?
13. For most autosomal dominant disorders, what are the chances of a heterozygote
and normal individual having an affected child?
14. Explain inheritance by multiple alleles. List the human blood types, and give the
possible genotypes for each.
15. Not all alleles are fully _____________ or ______________. Sometimes there is
an ________________ phenotype between those of the parent, which is called
______________ ___________________. When there is a representative of both
parents phenotypes it is called ___________________.
16. What is the subtle difference between incomplete dominance and
codominance?
17. Explain epistasis. (will talk about in class!)
18. Explain how sickle-cell disease is an example of pleitotropy.
19. Why are the traits of (a) human skin color and (b) human height not suitable
for explaining the concept of simple dominance?
20. Explain how multifactorial traits are related to polygenic traits.
21. In Morgan’s experiment he found that female fruit flies could have white eyes.
How could that happen if the trait is sex linked?
22. Why do sex linked traits occur more often in males than females?